Guest Column

By Sidhartha Thamby Every society that has passed through large-scale political violence carries the obligation to reckon with it honestly. That Sri Lanka shares this condition with dozens of other countries is not a reason for complacency — it is a reminder that resolution is possible because others have achieved it, and that failure is not inevitable. More than seventeen years after the Sri Lankan military crushed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in a brutal final campaign, the country h

Dr. Ruwan M Jayatunge, M.D. PhD The onset of the Ukrainian war in 2014 created significant manpower challenges, prompting both Russia and Ukraine to recruit former soldiers from various nations. This situation has led to the involvement of numerous ex-combatants and military personnel from Sri Lanka, driven largely by the country's severe economic conditions. Many veterans have unfortunately become targets for human trafficking networks and misleading social media campaigns that promote lucrati

By M.R. Narayan Swamy The fear of suffering electoral setbacks due to mass discontent over economic conditions is the key reason Sri Lanka’s main ruling party has decided against holding provincial council elections this year, Tamil political leaders say. Tilvin Silva, general secretary of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), said in an interview that the balloting cannot be conducted in 2026 “because of current developments in the country”. The possibility of holding the elections would be “

By M.R. Narayan Swamy AFP photographer R. Raveendran and I were in a taxi in the Tamil Tigers-held zone of Sri Lanka’s Batticaloa district in the mid-1990s when a young man with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder emerged from behind a tree and waved us down. When we said we were headed to Vakarai to try to meet Vinayagamurthy Muralitharan alias Karuna, the LTTE’s powerful eastern regional commander, he let us proceed. But he told a teenager to jump into the front of our cab. After realising we

By Che Ran Every year, on May 18, Tamils remember Mullivaikkal. And every year, like clockwork, the circus arrives. From Sri Lanka, we get the professional denialists — men who look at bombed hospitals, mass graves, disappeared families, surrendered civilians who never came home, and say, with the confidence of a man selling fake Rolexes in Pettah, “No, no, no. Nothing happened.” From India, we get the bargain-bin patriots — politicians who hear “Tamil civilian massacre” and immediatel

By Che Ran Sri Lanka has a strange relationship with accountability. We adore the theatre of justice. The press conference. The dramatic raid. The minister standing behind a microphone, sleeves metaphorically rolled up, promising to finally hunt down the untouchables. Every election, another government arrives carrying a moral broom the size of Adam’s Peak, vowing to sweep corruption out of the republic. And every few years, we discover the same depressing truth. The truly powerful rarely g